Screening of excitons in single, suspended carbon nanotubes

Resonant Raman spectroscopy of single carbon nanotubes suspended across trenches displays red-shifts of up to 30 meV of the electronic transition energies as a function of the surrounding dielectric environment. We develop a simple scaling relationship between the exciton binding energy and the external dielectric function and thus quantify the effect of screening. Our results imply that the underlying particle interaction energies change by hundreds of meV.